Japan and Israel (was Re: Anti-Zionism does not equal Anti-Semitism)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Feb 17 07:30:41 PST 1999


Alex <billy_e11 at hotmail.co> wrote:
>Personally, the religious/racist exclusion of who is a jew/law of return
>(being half jewish on my father's side)pisses me off and I think that
>the Zionist use of religios/ethnic criteria in oppressing Palestinians
>is despicable, but I do remember being fingerprinted when I lived in
>Japan because I was a foreigner and I do remember that Korean-Japanese
>that had lived in Japan for three generations (most of their forebears
>having been brought to Japan as slave laborers) were still not
>considered Japanese, legally or otherwise. Up unitl 1991 I believe third
>generation Korean-Japanese were still being fingerprinted. They also
>faced job discrimination. Korean-Japanese were also fairly segregated
>from what I remember, so I assume that there is de facto housing
>discrimination although I dont know what Japanese law says about that.
>
>I also remember a number of racist/fascist bastards (many of whom are in
>the LDP) who if someone had shot them I would not have been unhappy.

Japan has been, along with the UK and Israel, also an important junior partner of US imperialism, and in this sense, Japan is very similar to Israel. Israel anchors US military power in the Middle East; Japan plays the same role in the Pacific Theater. The CIA used to (and still does?) subsidize the LDP politicians. We also must remember history here; after the brief period of post-WWII anti-fascism, those reactionaries who should have been purged from public life as war criminals became 'rehabilitated' and were allowed to reoccupy their positions of power under the auspice of US occupation; at the same time, communists suffered from the Red Purge. (The same 'renazification' of public life happened in West Germany as well. In West Germany and Japan at least, the new left upsurge of the 60s [including its errors and excesses] should be seen in part as the reaction to this history of the post-war rehabilitation of fascists.) There are historians who argue that the Vietnam War's main cause and effect is to retain South East Asia as the area to be used for Japan's post-war economic recovery (which was very much doubtful initially--Japan's economic take-off more or less conincided with the Korean War and soared after the Vietnam War): sources of raw materials and cheap labor (and more recently consumers of second-rate technologies), which Japan can integrate into its sphere of economic hegemony. See, for instance, Bruce Cumings' work on this subject.

In Japan, there are at least six different categories of people who suffer from various degrees of discrimination: the Koreans and the Korean-Japanese; Okinawans; Ainu; undocumented workers; Eta (comparable to the untouchables in India); and women in general.

What makes the lives of the Koreans + the Korean-Japanese (and any other immigrants') very difficult in Japan is the stringent requirements of assimilation that the government put up as barriers. Due to such obstacles, many Koreans in Japan have opted to retain their nationality and remain 'foreigners,' rather than getting assimilated into their enemies & oppressors' culture. Another point to be noted is that the Koreans & Korean-Japanese are politically divided into at least two camps, depending on whether you regard North or South Korea as the legitimate homeland that symbolizes Korea. Many Koreans in Japan set up and go to their own schools, which are also divided along the political border I mentioned above. Several years ago, I recall, there was a controversy that set this rift in relief. It involved the building of a memorial for the Korean victims of the Atomic Bombs. In Japanese, North Korea is called *Kita Cho Sen* and South Korea *Kankoku*. What words to etched in the memorial to refer to the Koreans? *Chosenjin* or *Kankokujin*? The exact resolution of the conflict escapes me (though I do remember the memorial was eventually erected at the margin of the Hiroshima Heiwa Park), but it was a controversy that highlighted many axes of division and domination that affect the lives of the Koreans and the Korean-Japanese in Japan: the US hegemony; the Japanese ethno-chauvinism; political antagonisms among the Koreans and the Korean-Japanese, and so on.

Yoshie



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